"The Importance of Being Earnest," Vocabulary from Act 1 - Vocabulary List : Vocabulary.com "The Importance of Being Earnest," Vocabulary from Act 1 September 22, 2013 By Vocabulary.com (NY) Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" involves people adopting other identities to escape their obligations (etext found here ). Learn these word lists for the play: Act 1 , Act 2 , Act 3 Read more... forte an asset of special worth or utility I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. Algernon is both punning and ironical here because "forte" is a direction in music that means to play loudly, which he did, but he did not play the piano well, so it is not his forte. Additionally, the sentence is a reversal of the purpose of a musical direction, since the volume in which one plays often emphasizes emotions, but Algernon declares that his special, tenderly romantic emotions are what direct him in his inaccurate but worth-hearing piano-playing. attribute credit to I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir.

I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. In blaming marriage for the decreased quality of champagne (thus attributing the good supply of liquor to Algernon's bachelorhood), Lane diverts his employer's attention away from the fact that he and other servants drank several bottles. Here, and later when he lies to prevent his employer from getting in trouble with his aunt about the missing cucumber sandwiches, Lane shows an attribute ("a construct distinguishing objects or individuals") of agreeable cleverness. consequence the outcome of an event I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person. form or compose The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted. Jack is responding to Algernon's statements: "The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact." "Constituted" is also a curious adjective to describe a memory that seeks to forget, but Jack uses it as a pun that connects to the legal procedures that formed and inform Divorce Court. reflect deeply on a subject Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject.

Divorces are made in Heaven-- earnest devout, heartfelt You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. In addition to being a pun on the chosen name of Jack's alter ego, "earnest" means "characterized by a firm, humorless belief in one's opinions" (which describes Jack as he explains the reason for his two names), "devout, heartfelt" (which describes Jack's feelings for Gwendolen), and "not distracted by anything unrelated to the goal" (which can describe Jack's decisions about being christened). invalid someone who is incapacitated by a chronic illness or injury I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

"Invalid" also means not valid ("well-grounded in logic or truth or having legal force")--this is a fitting description of Bunbury because 1) he's not real; 2) it's a ridiculous-sounding name, especially in comparison to Jack's lie about an "Ernest"; 3) he always seems to get sick at the most inconvenient times for others; 4) Algernon cannot use Bunbury to avoid paying his bills. induce cause to act in a specified manner Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know Bunbury. sententious abounding in or given to pompous or aphoristic moralizing Jack. [Sententiously.] That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. believing the worst of human nature and motives For heaven’s sake, don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical.

Jack, about to propose to Gwendolen, does not want to hear Algernon's cynical views on marriage, which include the point that "in married life three is company and two is none." In trying to dismiss the theory, Jack connects it to the corrupt French Drama, which is actually more ironic than cynical of the Irish playwright, since Wilde was fluent in French, spent time in Paris, and wrote a play in French that could not be produced on the English stage because it was about Biblical characters. expurgation the deletion of objectionable parts from a literary work I’m sure the programme will be delightful, after a few expurgations. French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse. Within the play, "expurgation" is used by Lady Bracknell to refer to changes she might want to make in the musical program that Algernon has planned for her reception. Outside the play, Wilde could be referring to the work he had to do (the play originally had 4 acts) to make it an appropriate yet mocking fit for the Victorian audience.

pulpit a platform raised to give prominence to the person on it The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest. metaphysical highly abstract and overly theoretical Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them. known widely and usually unfavorably Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! lying down; in a position of comfort or rest Rise, sir, from this semi- recumbent posture. It is most indecorous. "Indecorous" means "not in keeping with accepted standards of what is right or proper in polite society"--this adjective does not entirely describe the nature of Jack's semi-recumbent posture; while it may seem improper to the intruding Lady Bracknell, in Gwendolen's eyes, it is the position she wants Jack in and she wants him to get it right, as other men, like her brother, have tried to do through practice.

easily broken or damaged or destroyed Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. disposition a natural or acquired habit or characteristic tendency The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time. contempt a manner that is generally disrespectful To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. indiscretion a petty misdeed As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society. a feeling of righteous anger [Lady Bracknell sweeps out in majestic indignation.] a three-legged metal stand for supporting a cooking vessel Oh, Gwendolen is as right as a trivet.

"Right as a trivet" means "in perfect state or health" which according to Jack, means Gwendolen has agreed to marry him. This is an odd analogy for a man in love, especially in contrast to the one comparing Gwendolen's mother to a monstrous female creature in Greek mythology. The word "trivet" sounds funny and has echoes of the play's subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. tedious so lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die. patronizing characteristic of those who treat others with arrogance Jack. [In a very patronising manner.] My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman! unrestrained by convention or morality What about the profligate Ernest? a loss of consciousness from the lack of oxygen in the brain I’ll say he died in Paris of apoplexy.

The Importance of Being Earnest | The Importance Of Being Earnest | Oscar Wilde THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST By Oscar Wilde CONTEXT Oscar Wilde, celebrated playwright and literary provocateur, was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford before settling in London. During his days at Dublin and Oxford, he developed a set of attitudes and postures for which he would eventually become famous. Chief among these were his flamboyant style of dress, his contempt for conventional values, and his belief in aestheticism\u2014a movement that embraced the principle of art for the sake of beauty and beauty alone. After a stunning performance in college, Wilde settled in London in 1878, where he moved in circles that included Lillie Langtry, the novelists Henry James and George Moore, and the young William Butler Yeats. Literary and artistic acclaim were slow in coming to Wilde. In 1884, when he married Constance Lloyd, Wilde\u2019s writing career was still a work in progress.

He had gone on a lecture tour of North America and been lampooned in the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience as the self-consciously idiosyncratic philosopher-poet Reginald Bunthorne, but he was celebrated chiefly as a well-known personality and a wit. He may have been the first person ever to become famous for being famous. During the late 1880s, Wilde wrote reviews, edited a women\u2019s magazine, and published a volume of poetry and one of children\u2019s stories. In 1891, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared and was attacked as scandalous and immoral. In that same year, he met Lord Alfred Douglas, who would eventually become his lover, and Wilde finally hit his literary stride. Over the next few years, he wrote four plays: Lady Windermere\u2019s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Windermere\u2019s Fan and A Woman of No Importance enjoyed successful runs in the West End in 1892 and 1893, respectively.

An Ideal Husband opened in January 1895, but it was The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened a month later, that is regarded by many as Oscar Wilde\u2019s masterpiece. Its first performance at the St. James\u2019s Theater on February 14, 1895 came at the height of Wilde\u2019s success as a popular dramatist. Wilde was finally the darling of London society, a position he had striven for years to attain. In many ways, The Importance of Being Earnest was an artistic breakthrough for Wilde, something between self-parody and a deceptively flippant commentary on the dramatic genre in which Wilde had already had so much success. Wilde\u2019s genre of choice was the Victorian melodrama, or \u201csentimental comedy,\u201d derived from the French variety of \u201cwell-made play\u201d popularized by Scribe and Sardou.

In such plays, fallen women and abandoned children of uncertain parentage figure prominently, letters cross and recross the stage, and dark secrets from the past rise to threaten the happiness of seemingly respectable, well-meaning characters. In Wilde\u2019s hands, the form of Victorian melodrama became something else entirely. Wilde introduced a new character to the genre, the figure of the \u201cdandy\u201d (a man who pays excessive attention to his appearance). This figure added a moral texture the form had never before possessed. The character of the dandy was heavily autobiographical and often a stand-in for Wilde himself, a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes, ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society\u2019s moral arbiters, and self- deprecatingly presents himself as trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. In fact, the dandy in these plays always proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy resolution of the plot. The Importance of Being Earnest was an early experiment in Victorian melodrama.

Part satire, part comedy of manners, and part intellectual farce, this play seems to have nothing at stake because the world it presents is so blatantly and ostentatiously artificial. Below the surface of the light, brittle comedy, however, is a serious subtext that takes aim at self-righteous moralism and hypocrisy, the very aspects of Victorian society that would, in part, bring about Wilde\u2019s downfall. During 1895, however, a series of catastrophes stemming from Wilde\u2019s relationship with Lord Alfred, also a poet, led to personal humiliation and social, professional, and financial ruin. On February 28, 1895, two weeks after The Importance of Being Earnest\u2019s opening night, Lord Alfred\u2019s belligerent, homophobic father, the Marquess of Queensberry, publicly accused Wilde of \u201cposing as a somdomite.\u201d The nobleman meant \u201csodomite,\u201d of course, an insulting and potentially defamatory term for a homosexual.

Queensberry had for some time been harassing Wilde with insulting letters, notes, and confrontations and had hoped to disrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with a public demonstration, which never took place. Against the advice of his friends, Wilde sued for libel and lost. Wilde probably should have fled the country, as the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had made homosexual acts punishable by up to two years\u2019 imprisonment. However, Wilde chose to stay and was arrested. Despite information about Wilde\u2019s private life and writings that emerged at the trial, the prosecution initially proved unsuccessful. However, Wilde was tried a second time, convicted, and sentenced to prison for two years. Wilde may have remained in England for a number of reasons, including self-destructiveness, denial, desperation, and a desire for martyrdom. However, some historians have suggested that Wilde\u2019s relentless persecution by the government was a diversionary tactic. Lord Alfred\u2019s older brother was reportedly also having a homosexual affair with Archibald Philip Primrose, Lord Rosebery, the man who would become prime minister.

Queensberry was apparently so outraged that he threatened to disclose the relationship, and the government reacted by punishing Wilde and his lover in an effort to assuage the marquess. In any case, Wilde served his full sentence under conditions of utmost hardship and cruelty. Following his release from prison, his health and spirit broken, he sought exile in France, where he lived out the last two years of his life in poverty and obscurity under an assumed name. He died in Paris in 1900. For sixty or seventy years after Wilde\u2019s death, critics and audiences regarded The Importance of Being Earnest as a delightful but utterly frivolous and superficial comedy, a view that partly reflects the mindset of a period in which homosexuality remained a guarded topic. The decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967 and the emergence in American of an interest in gay culture, and particularly in the covert homosexual literature of the past, has made it possible to view the play in a different light. The play\u2019s danger and subversion are easier to see from a twenty-first-century perspective.

In the ambiguity over exactly what people refer to when they speak of \u201cwicked\u201d or immoral behavior, we can detect a system of coded references to homosexuality, just as we can infer a more general comment on the hypocrisy of late Victorian society. PLOT OVERVIEW Jack Worthing, the play\u2019s protagonist, is a pillar of the community in Hertfordshire, where he is guardian to Cecily Cardew, the pretty, eighteen-year-old granddaughter of the late Thomas Cardew, who found and adopted Jack when he was a baby. In Hertfordshire, Jack has responsibilities: he is a major landowner and justice of the peace, with tenants, farmers, and a number of servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible black-sheep brother named Ernest who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of pleasure and is always getting into trouble of a sort that requires Jack to rush grimly off to his assistance. In fact, Ernest is merely Jack\u2019s alibi, a phantom that allows him to disappear for days at a time and do as he likes. No one but Jack knows that he himself is Ernest.

Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, which is where he really goes on these occasions\u2014probably to pursue the very sort of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his imaginary brother. Jack is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, the cousin of his best friend, Algernon Moncrieff. When the play opens, Algernon, who knows Jack as Ernest, has begun to suspect something, having found an inscription inside Jack\u2019s cigarette case addressed to \u201cUncle Jack\u201d from someone who refers to herself as \u201clittle Cecily.\u201d Algernon suspects that Jack may be leading a double life, a practice he seems to regard as commonplace and indispensable to modern life. He calls a person who leads a double life a \u201cBunburyist,\u201d after a nonexistent friend he pretends to have, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to whose deathbed he is forever being summoned whenever he wants to get out of some tiresome social obligation.

At the beginning of Act I, Jack drops in unexpectedly on Algernon and announces that he intends to propose to Gwendolen. Algernon confronts him with the cigarette case and forces him to come clean, demanding to know who \u201cJack\u201d and \u201cCecily\u201d are. Jack confesses that his name isn\u2019t really Ernest and that Cecily is his ward, a responsibility imposed on him by his adoptive father\u2019s will. Jack also tells Algernon about his fictional brother. Jack says he\u2019s been thinking of killing off this fake brother, since Cecily has been showing too active an interest in him. Without meaning to, Jack describes Cecily in terms that catch Algernon\u2019s attention and make him even more interested in her than he is already. Gwendolen and her mother, Lady Bracknell, arrive, which gives Jack an opportunity to propose to Gwendolen.

Jack is delighted to discover that Gwendolen returns his affections, but he is alarmed to learn that Gwendolen is fixated on the name Ernest, which she says \u201cinspires absolute confidence.\u201d Gwendolen makes clear that she would not consider marrying a man who was not named Ernest. Lady Bracknell interviews Jack to determine his eligibility as a possible son-in-law, and during this interview she asks about his family background. When Jack explains that he has no idea who his parents were and that he was found, by the man who adopted him, in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, Lady Bracknell is scandalized. She forbids the match between Jack and Gwendolen and sweeps out of the house. In Act II, Algernon shows up at Jack\u2019s country estate posing as Jack\u2019s brother Ernest. Meanwhile, Jack, having decided that Ernest has outlived his usefulness, arrives home in deep mourning, full of a story about Ernest having died suddenly in Paris. He is enraged to find Algernon there masquerading as Ernest but has to go along with the charade.

If he doesn\u2019t, his own lies and deceptions will be revealed. While Jack changes out of his mourning clothes, Algernon, who has fallen hopelessly in love with Cecily, asks her to marry him. He is surprised to discover that Cecily already considers that they are engaged, and he is charmed when she reveals that her fascination with \u201cUncle Jack\u2019s brother\u201d led her to invent an elaborate romance between herself and him several months ago. Algernon is less enchanted to learn that part of Cecily\u2019s interest in him derives from the name Ernest, which, unconsciously echoing Gwendolen, she says \u201cinspires absolute confidence.\u201d Algernon goes off in search of Dr. Chasuble, the local rector, to see about getting himself christened Ernest. Meanwhile, Gwendolen arrives, having decided to pay Jack an unexpected visit. Gwendolen is shown into the garden, where Cecily orders tea and attempts to play hostess.

Cecily has no idea how Gwendolen figures into Jack\u2019s life, and Gwendolen, for her part, has no idea who Cecily is. Gwendolen initially thinks Cecily is a visitor to the Manor House and is disconcerted to learn that Cecily is \u201cMr. Worthing\u2019s ward.\u201d She notes that Ernest has never mentioned having a ward, and Cecily explains that it is not Ernest Worthing who is her guardian but his brother Jack and, in fact, that she is engaged to be married to Ernest Worthing. More From This User The Importance of Being Earnest The Importance of Being Earnest or browse other Shmoopers' Questions In A Nutshell If you're anything like the seething hivemind here at Shmoop, you love British comedy. Blistering banter ? Bullet-quick repartee? Totally bizarre statements issued with poker faces? We can't get enough of that tea-and-crumpet-infused hilarity. And we're not the only ones. Think of American comedy shows like Veep, The Office, or Shameless—all based on British shows.

But the U.K. invasion of comedy isn't a recent phenomenon. No, it's been infiltrating the global scene since the time when the sun never set on the British Empire. And one of the biggest names in comedy during the Victorian Era was Oscar Wilde. (He's Irish, but remember that Ireland was part of the Empire way back when.) Wilde's comedy skewers Victorian England. He pokes fun of the entire social structure of fainting corset queens and mustachioed dandies... and still manages to be totally guffaw-provoking even today. "Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it," wrote Wilde in Vera; or, The Nihilists . And boy does that statement echo throughout his career. This is a guy who experimented with achieving the perfect ratio of serious to trivial. And by the time Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, he had perfected his comedic recipe. The Importance of Being Earnest debuted in London on February 14, 1895, when Wilde was at the height of his powers. But don't be fooled by the title. There is nothing earnest about this play, at least on the surface.

It’s a satire of the Victorian Era , when an intricate code of behavior governed everything from communication to sexuality. The most important rules applied to the farce of Victorian marriage—a topic that hit home for Wilde, who was married to a woman but sexually involved with men. During the Victorian period, marriage was about protecting your resources and keeping socially unacceptable impulses (like being gay) under control. We can see this at work in the The Importance of Being Earnest. The ridiculous end of the play—three engagements in five minutes—is a "happy" one because everyone gets together, but underneath this perfect comic ending there's more than a hint of darkness. The characters only get together because their social and economic fitness for each other is demonstrated—not because of true love. It's this hint of bitterness that makes the sweetness of Wilde's comedy all the more delicious... and insured his legacy as a founding father of modern U.K. comedy. Why Should I Care? We're all a little guilty of Bunburying. No, you weirdos: that is not a sexy euphemism. It's a witty Wilde phrase that refers to pretending to have a prior engagement. We all know it's hard to be accepted as someone who contains multitudes .

Sometimes you just need an alter-ego... or a really good alibi. Maybe you're a lit nerd who tells his friends that he's going to see a Shakespeare play... and instead sneaks off to go to the rodeo. Maybe you're a lacrosse player... who also LARPs as an elf. Maybe you're a responsible gentleman who needs to cut loose every once in a while and decides to call himself "Ernest" while wreaking havoc in London. Or maybe you're a good-time socialite who needs some R&R and pretends to visit his ailing buddy Bunbury. All the characters in The Importance of Being Earnest are Bunburying in one way or another. Jack pretends to be Ernest. Algernon "visits" his friend Bunbury. Cecily writes about a fictitious love affair in her diary. Miss Prism writes a novel. Wait. Is anyone being earnest in this play? According to Oscar Wilde, heck yes. For Wilde, a gay man in the hyper-repressive Victorian Era, it was necessary and absolutely imperative—it was dang well earnest—to divide yourself up when you lived under the thumb of Victorianism. It wasn't just the corseted ladies of the day who couldn't breathe.

It was everyone. What else could you do in the face of such repression but become multiple people? Four days after The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed, Wilde was called out by his boyfriend's dad for being gay. This led to a series of events: Wilde was tried, sentenced to two years of hard labor, and imprisoned. He died less than five years later. Thankfully, we've come a long way since then. But the importance of The Importance of Being Earnest is, well, being earnest. The rallying cry of Wilde's masterpiece is that it's super-foolish (although, admittedly, hilarious) to pretend to be what you're not. We owe it to Wilde to be ourselves—in all our messy, multifaceted glory. Oh, yeah: we also owe it to Wilde to snicker uncontrollably at his super-funny play. SparkNotes: The Importance of Being Earnest: Themes, Motifs, and Symbols The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Nature of Marriage Marriage is of paramount importance in The Importance of Being Earnest, both as a primary force motivating the plot and as a subject for philosophical speculation and debate.

The question of the nature of marriage appears for the first time in the opening dialogue between Algernon and his butler, Lane, and from this point on the subject never disappears for very long. Algernon and Jack discuss the nature of marriage when they dispute briefly about whether a marriage proposal is a matter of “business” or “pleasure,” and Lady Bracknell touches on the issue when she states, “An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be.” Even Lady Bracknell’s list of bachelors and the prepared interview to which she subjects Jack are based on a set of assumptions about the nature and purpose of marriage. In general, these assumptions reflect the conventional preoccupations of Victorian respectability—social position, income, and character.

The play is actually an ongoing debate about the nature of marriage and whether it is “pleasant or unpleasant.” Lane remarks casually that he believes it to be “a very pleasant state,” before admitting that his own marriage, now presumably ended, was the result of “a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.” Algernon regards Lane’s views on marriage as “somewhat lax.” His own views are relentlessly cynical until he meets and falls in love with Cecily. Jack, by contrast, speaks in the voice of the true romantic. He tells Algernon, however, that the truth “isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.” At the end of the play, Jack apologizes to Gwendolen when he realizes he had been telling the truth all his life. She forgives him, she says, on the grounds that she thinks he’s sure to change, which suggests Gwendolen’s own rather cynical view of the nature of men and marriage. The Constraints of Morality Morality and the constraints it imposes on society is a favorite topic of conversation in The Importance of Being Earnest. Algernon thinks the servant class has a responsibility to set a moral standard for the upper classes.

Jack thinks reading a private cigarette case is “ungentlemanly.” “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read,” Algernon points out. These restrictions and assumptions suggest a strict code of morals that exists in Victorian society, but Wilde isn’t concerned with questions of what is and isn’t moral. Instead, he makes fun of the whole Victorian idea of morality as a rigid body of rules about what people should and shouldn’t do. The very title of the play is a double-edged comment on the phenomenon. The play’s central plot—the man who both is and isn’t Ernest/earnest—presents a moral paradox. Earnestness, which refers to both the quality of being serious and the quality of being sincere, is the play’s primary object of satire. Characters such as Jack, Gwendolen, Miss Prism, and Dr. Chasuble, who put a premium on sobriety and honesty, are either hypocrites or else have the rug pulled out from under them. What Wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the opposite of earnestness: irreverence. Hypocrisy vs. Inventiveness Algernon and Jack may create similar deceptions, but they are not morally equivalent characters.

When Jack fabricates his brother Ernest’s death, he imposes that fantasy on his loved ones, and though we are aware of the deception, they, of course, are not. He rounds out the deception with costumes and props, and he does his best to convince the family he’s in mourning. He is acting hypocritically. In contrast, Algernon and Cecily make up elaborate stories that don’t really assault the truth in any serious way or try to alter anyone else’s perception of reality. In a sense, Algernon and Cecily are characters after Wilde’s own heart, since in a way they invent life for themselves as though life is a work of art. In some ways, Algernon, not Jack, is the play’s real hero. Not only is Algernon like Wilde in his dandified, exquisite wit, tastes, and priorities, but he also resembles Wilde to the extent that his fictions and inventions resemble those of an artist. The Importance of Not Being “Earnest” Earnestness, which implies seriousness or sincerity, is the great enemy of morality in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Earnestness can take many forms, including boringness, solemnity, pomposity, complacency, smugness, self-righteousness, and sense of duty, all of which Wilde saw as hallmarks of the Victorian character. When characters in the play use the word serious, they tend to mean “trivial,” and vice versa. For example, Algernon thinks it “shallow” for people not to be “serious” about meals, and Gwendolen believes, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.” For Wilde, the word earnest comprised two different but related ideas: the notion of false truth and the notion of false morality, or moralism. The moralism of Victorian society—its smugness and pomposity—impels Algernon and Jack to invent fictitious alter egos so as to be able to escape the strictures of propriety and decency. However, what one member of society considers decent or indecent doesn’t always reflect what decency really is. One of the play’s paradoxes is the impossibility of actually being either earnest (meaning “serious” or “sincere”) or moral while claiming to be so.

The characters who embrace triviality and wickedness are the ones who may have the greatest chance of attaining seriousness and virtue. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Puns In The Importance of Being Earnest, the pun, widely considered to be the lowest form of verbal wit, is rarely just a play on words. The pun in the title is a case in point. The earnest/Ernest joke strikes at the very heart of Victorian notions of respectability and duty. Gwendolen wants to marry a man called Ernest, and she doesn’t care whether the man actually possesses the qualities that comprise earnestness. She is, after all, quick to forgive Jack’s deception. In embodying a man who is initially neither “earnest” nor “Ernest,” and who, through forces beyond his control, subsequently becomes both “earnest” and “Ernest,” Jack is a walking, breathing paradox and a complex symbol of Victorian hypocrisy. In Act III, when Lady Bracknell quips that until recently she had no idea there were any persons “whose origin was a Terminus,” she too is making an extremely complicated pun.

The joke is that a railway station is as far back as Jack can trace his identity and therefore a railway station actually is his “origin,” hence the pun. In Wilde’s day, as in the England of today, the first stop on a railway line is known as the “origin” and the last stop as the “terminus.” There’s also a whole series of implicit subsidiary puns on words like line and connection that can refer to either ancestry or travel. Wilde is poking fun at Lady Bracknell’s snobbery. He depicts her as incapable of distinguishing between a railway line and a family line, social connections and railway connections, a person’s ancestral origins and the place where he chanced to be found. In general, puns add layers of meaning to the characters’ lines and call into question the true or intended meaning of what is being said. Inversion One of the most common motifs in The Importance of Being Earnest is the notion of inversion, and inversion takes many forms. The play contains inversions of thought, situation, and character, as well as inversions of common notions of morality or philosophical thought.

When Algernon remarks, “Divorces are made in Heaven,” he inverts the cliché about marriages being “made in heaven.” Similarly, at the end of the play, when Jack calls it “a terrible thing” for a man to discover that he’s been telling the truth all his life, he inverts conventional morality. Most of the women in the play represent an inversion of accepted Victorian practices with regard to gender roles. Lady Bracknell usurps the role of the father in interviewing Jack, since typically this was a father’s task, and Gwendolen and Cecily take charge of their own romantic lives, while the men stand by watching in a relatively passive role. The trick that Wilde plays on Miss Prism at the end of the play is also a kind of inversion: The trick projects onto the play’s most fervently moralistic character the image of the “fallen woman” of melodrama. Death Jokes about death appear frequently in The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell comes onstage talking about death, and in one of the play’s many inversions, she says her friend Lady Harbury looks twenty years younger since the death of her husband.

With respect to Bunbury, she suggests that death is an inconvenience for others—she says Bunbury is “shilly-shallying” over whether “to live or to die.” On being told in Act III that Bunbury has died suddenly in accordance with his physicians’ predictions, Lady Bracknell commends Bunbury for acting “under proper medical advice.” Miss Prism speaks as though death were something from which one could learn a moral lesson and piously says she hopes Ernest will profit from having died. Jack and Algernon have several conversations about how to “kill” Jack’s imaginary brother. Besides giving the play a layer of dark humor, the death jokes also connect to the idea of life being a work of art. Most of the characters discuss death as something over which a person actually has control, as though death is a final decision one can make about how to shape and color one’s life. The Dandy To the form of Victorian melodrama, Wilde contributed the figure of the dandy, a character who gave the form a moral texture it had never before possessed.

In Wilde’s works, the dandy is a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes and ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters. To a very large extent, this figure was a self-portrait, a stand-in for Wilde himself. The dandy isn’t always a comic figure in Wilde’s work. In A Woman of No Importance and The Picture of Dorian Gray, he takes the form of the villains Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wootton, respectively. But in works such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde seems to be evolving a more positive and clearly defined moral position on the figure of the dandy. The dandy pretends to be all about surface, which makes him seem trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. Lord Darlington and Lord Goring (in Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband) both present themselves this way. In fact, the dandy in both plays turns out to be something very close to the real hero. He proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy resolution of the plot.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon has many characteristics of the dandy, but he remains morally neutral throughout the play. Many other characters also express dandiacal sentiments and views. Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell are being dandiacal when they assert the importance of surfaces, style, or “profile,” and even Jack echoes the philosophy of the dandy when he comes onstage asserting that “pleasure” is the only thing that should “bring one anywhere.” For the most part, these utterances seem to be part of Wilde’s general lampooning of the superficiality of the upper classes. The point is that it’s the wrong sort of superficiality because it doesn’t recognize and applaud its own triviality. In fact, Cecily, with her impatience with self-improvement and conventional morality and her curiosity about “wickedness,” is arguably the character who, after Algernon, most closely resembles the dandy. Her dandiacal qualities make her a perfect match for him. Symbols

Question: Who wrote the play containing the mythical 'Bunbury'?
Answer: Oscar Wilde